REOPENED: The Bad Cop

Summary

Cold Case Files: REOPENED - The Bad Cop

Hosted by Paula Barros, "Cold Case Files" delves into some of America's most perplexing unsolved murders. In the episode titled "REOPENED: The Bad Cop," listeners are taken through the intricate investigation of Kimberly Wright's mysterious death, which remained unsolved for over a decade before a breakthrough led to justice.

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Introduction to the Case

On May 1, 1993, Kimberly Wright and her husband Doug, a former State Trooper grappling with disciplinary issues, were navigating a tumultuous separation. Their relationship was marred by frequent arguments over their home, alimony, child support, and custody of their son.

The Night of the Incident (01:08 - 02:14)

• Event Timeline:
  • Doug visited Kimberly's home with the intent to discuss their divorce.
  • They engaged in intimate relations, followed by a heated argument. Kimberly, reportedly intoxicated, became violent and threw a glass at Doug, shattering it.
  • Seeking to de-escalate, Doug left to play with the dogs and tend to their son's toys.
  • Approximately an hour later, Doug returned to find Kimberly bleeding on the basement couch and immediately called 911.

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Initial Investigation and Red Flags (02:14 - 09:04)

First Responders and Suspicious Behavior (02:14 - 03:30)

• Deputy Sipanek was the first to arrive at the scene. Recognizing Doug’s background as a former state trooper, Deputy Sipanek noted discrepancies in Doug’s behavior.

  • Detective David Dwyer recounts, “[...] when I shook his hand, his hands were all wet. Still, he told me he just washed his hands.” (02:28)

• Doug led Deputy Sipanek to the basement, where they discovered Kimberly with a significant wound in her mid-sternum area.

• Doug claimed to have attempted CPR on Kimberly, but Deputy Sipanek questioned the feasibility of performing CPR on a couch, stating, “One of the first things I teach on CPR is you do it on a hard surface and the couch is no place to do CPR.” (03:12)

Autopsy Findings and Indeterminate Death (06:57 - 08:19)

• Dr. Kazi Azer conducted the autopsy, revealing Kimberly's blood alcohol level was 0.4, raising doubts about her ability to execute a suicide.

• Dr. Azer concluded the manner of death as indeterminate, stating, “I will leave this as indeterminate, and maybe in future we will have some more clues and some more information which could lead to the correct manner of death.” (07:57)

• Despite suspicions, Deputy Petrovka emphasized the need for concrete evidence, leading to the case remaining open but inactive for years.

Community Insights and Further Suspicion (08:19 - 09:04)

• Kimberly's cousin, Beth, provided crucial testimony, revealing that Doug had frequently threatened Kimberly, stating, “I can kill you and make it,” and referred to her endearingly as “Aunt Betts.” (08:47)

• Despite mounting circumstantial evidence, the district attorney deemed it insufficient to press charges, leaving Kimberly’s death unresolved.

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Reopening the Case (09:04 - 10:34)

In 2000, with the election of Sheriff Robert Pickell in Genesee County, a renewed interest in cold cases emerged. Pickell appointed James Gage, a former state trooper, as his second-in-command. Gage recognized the potential in re-examining cases like Kimberly's and identified Doug Wright as a key suspect.

• Detective David Dwyer, with just a year of experience, was entrusted with the case. Dwyer noted the importance of Doug's suspicious actions: “Any one of those things would be a flag that this is problematic.” (10:34)

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The Interrogation Process (14:14 - 19:47)

Initial Interrogation in Florida (14:14 - 15:54)

• In March 2002, Dwyer traveled to Florida to interview Doug Wright, who was living there at the time.

• Upon arrival, Dwyer confronted Doug with inconsistencies in his initial statements, attempting to unsettle him.

  • Dwyer: “You wouldn't think a person, if they wanted to seriously discuss, would bring a lot of liquor with them. And I would not have thought he would have been bringing a weapon with him in his briefcase. That seems a little unusual.” (06:09)

• Doug remained uncooperative, leading to a temporary retreat from the interrogation.

Strategic Bluff and Recording (15:00 - 16:59)

• Dwyer employed a recording device disguised as a cell phone to gain Doug's trust during a second meeting at a local hotel.

• Dwyer: “[...] when I tell you right off the bat, I believed you when you said that you killed the trigger. But if you tell me that you weren't down there, okay, if you stick with that, the picture that's painted of you is that you did something bad.” (15:54)

• This tactic aimed to provoke Doug into revealing inconsistencies, which he eventually did, admitting to being present at the time of Kimberly's death.

  • Dwyer: “He says, I get into the stairwell and I hear a gunshot. [...] Did you try grabbing the gun from her as she shot herself?” (16:32)

• Doug's fluctuating statements and admissions were pivotal in building a case against him.

Building the Case and Conviction (17:14 - 19:47)

• The amassed circumstantial evidence and Doug's inconsistent testimonies convinced the jury of his guilt.

• Dwyer: “How does a jury look at that story? I hear a gunshot, and then I go outside, and then I come back and do all this stuff to the scene. A jury can read through that.” (16:59)

• In 2003, Doug Wright was brought to trial in Michigan. His ambiguous and conflicting testimonies, especially about the sounds he purportedly heard during the incident, undermined his defense.

  • Dwyer: “[...] a gunshot doesn't sound like a lamp breaking, does it? Surely not.” (18:30)

• Outcome: Convicted on strong circumstantial evidence, Doug was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison, with his earliest release date set for 2024. Kimberly’s family expressed profound gratitude for the diligent work of the investigative team.

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Conclusion and Aftermath (19:47 - 21:36)

Doug Wright, now 68 years old, remains incarcerated, serving time for Kimberly Wright's murder. The case stands as a testament to the perseverance and strategic investigative efforts of Detective David Dwyer and his team, transforming a cold case into a resolved homicide.

Kimberly's cousin, Beth, shared her appreciation: “We are so grateful to them.” (19:30)

The episode underscores the critical role of tenacity and innovative investigative techniques in solving long-buried crimes, offering hope to countless unresolved cases across America.

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Production Credits:

• Host: Brooke Giddings
• Producers: McKamey, Lynn, and Steve Delamater
• Executive Producer: Ted Butler
• Music: Blake Maples
• Distribution: PodcastOne

Connect with Cold Case Files:

• Twitter: @rookginnings
• Instagram: Brooke the Podcaster
• Facebook Group: Podcast for Justice
• Website: [e-mail]

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This detailed account not only highlights the complexities involved in solving cold cases but also celebrates the dedication of law enforcement professionals committed to uncovering the truth.

Transcript

[Brooke Giddings]

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[Detective David Dwyer]

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[Brooke Giddings]

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[Detective David Dwyer]

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[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Kimberly Wright and her husband Doug were separated and on their way to divorce. They seemed to fight about everything the house, alimony, child support and custody of their son. Doug, A former State Trooper visited Kimberly's home on May 1, 1993. According to Doug, the two had sex and then got into an argument. Kimberly had been drinking and was becoming violent. She even threw a glass at Doug, causing it to shatter. Doug decided to go outside and play with the dogs and pick up some of his son's toys. A little under an hour later, when Doug went back into the house, he found his wife bleeding on the basement couch. Immediately called 911.

[Detective David Dwyer]

911.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

From A E. This is cold Case Files. Deputy Sipanek was the first to arrive on the scene.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Doug Wright met me at the door. When you're a police officer, certain things you'll key in on. They'll throw up little flags of you know what to watch out for. When I shook his hand, his hands were all wet. Still, he told me he just washed his hands.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Deputies of panic recognized Doug as a former state trooper, one who had recently been fired for disciplinary problems. Doug led the deputy to the basement.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Lying on the couch was Kim. She had a hole in her shirt about the mid sternum area.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Doug told Deputies of Panic that he had tried to save Kimberly using cpr, but the fact that her body was still on the couch made the deputy question his story.

[Detective David Dwyer]

One of the first things I teach on CPR is you do it on a hard surface and the couch is no place to do cpr.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

The crime scene didn't make sense to the deputy. So he called the forensic team to process the area as a potential homicide. And he asked Doug Wright to come to the station for an interview.

[Brooke Giddings]

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[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Detective Ives Petrovka conducted the interview. Doug tells the detective that he had gone to Kimberly's house to discuss their divorce. He brought with him a briefcase with the divorce papers, two bottles of whiskey, and a pistol. This is Deputy Petrovka.

[Detective David Dwyer]

You wouldn't think a person, if they wanted to serious discuss, would bring a lot of liquor with them. And I would not have thought he would have been bringing a weapon with him in his briefcase. That seems a little unusual.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Doug told the detective about the fight and his time in the yard, and then told him that when he went back into the house, he had panicked. Doug said that he had moved Kimberly to try cpr, wrapped the gun in a towel so their son couldn't get to it, and threw away the whiskey bottles. Basically, a former officer had contaminated the scene.

[Detective David Dwyer]

A law enforcement officer that has been in any kind of crime scene knows you don't move anything, period. You just move nothing. He should have known better. He just should have known better. It should have been instinct being in law enforcement 20 years.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Kimberly's body was sent to the medical examiner the next day for an autopsy performed by Dr. Kazi Azer to determine if the death had been suicide or murder.

[Detective David Dwyer]

About 80% of the people, if they use handgun, they shoot to the head, and rest of the people shoot. Shoot to the chest, towards the left side, because they know that the heart is on the left side. So in this case, why? She selected an area which is difficult to reach and difficult to shoot. So that created a doubt in me.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Though it would have been a strange shot for suicide, it couldn't be ruled out. The doctor then moved on to the toxicology. Kimberly's blood alcohol level was 0.4, which is a huge amount. The doctor questioned if she would have been coherent enough to pull the trigger at all. However, alcohol is also a key ingredient in a lot of suicides.

[Detective David Dwyer]

I will leave this as indeterminate, and maybe in future we will have some more clues and some more information which could lead to the correct a manner of death.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

An indeterminate death wasn't helpful to Detective Petrovka, who strongly believed that Kimberly had been murdered.

[Detective David Dwyer]

When you started putting it all together, that's what I believed happened. Not only from the crime scene, but we received numerous calls from people that knew her and said that this lady was devoted to her son. There's no way. Call after call after call.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

One of those calls came from Kimberly's cousin Beth, who told the detective that Doug had frequently threatened his wife. He Would tell her her pet name.

[Detective David Dwyer]

For my mother was Aunt Betts.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

And he would say, I haven't been.

[Detective David Dwyer]

A cop for all these years without learning a thing or two. I can kill you and make it.

[Brooke Giddings]

Look like your Aunt Betts did it.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Beth's statement helped to strengthen the case, but it still wasn't enough to charge Doug Wright with murder.

[Detective David Dwyer]

It was a circumstantial case. It wasn't like we found his gun and he claimed it wasn't his gun. He said it was his gun. He said he took it there. He said he moved the body. He admitted to all this stuff. It wasn't like you found this piece of evidence and say, oh, I caught you in a lie.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

That was Detective Petrovka. The district attorney agreed with him. The case remained open, but no one appeared to be investigating Kimberly's death. In the year 2000, Genesee county got a new sheriff, Robert Pickell. He hired a new second in command, a former state trooper named James Gage. Sheriff Packel wanted his department to investigate some of the cold homicide cases. And James Gage mentioned a state trooper he once worked with, Doug Wright. This is James Gage.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Even back in 93, we felt there was enough there for a warrant, but the prosecutor's office didn't.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

At that time, Paquel asked his youngest detective to take on the task of talking with Wright and trying to catch him in a lie.

[Detective David Dwyer]

He doesn't alarm anyone. He looks like a choir boy. He's not threatening, but he has all of the right ingredients.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

32 year old David Dwyer agreed.

[Detective David Dwyer]

And only about a year in as a detective. And it was pretty humbling that the administration had the confidence in me to assign me such an important case.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Dwyer prepped for Wright's interrogation by going over the case file and memorizing what Wright had initially told the police. He also tried to get a feel for Wright's personality, to anticipate how he might react to certain lines of questioning.

[Detective David Dwyer]

To me, the key that was gonna make the case was going to be Doug Wright. In his statements, he moved the gun, he cleaned up afterwards. Any one of those things would be a flag that this is problematic.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

The sheriff had every confidence in his young detective.

[Detective David Dwyer]

I knew Dwyer would get him talking because of the psychology of the suspect. Write had a no. What does this guy Dwyer know? He would engage him in a conversation to find out what he knew about the murder and what his suspicions were.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

James Gage wasn't quite as sure.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Doug Wright could lie to the devil himself and make it convincing. I've seen it and I thought there's no way he's going to talk to this young detective.

[Brooke Giddings]

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[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Greenlight.com Coldcase On March 19, 2002, Dwyer flew to Florida, where Doug Wright lived at the time. Accompanied by two local detectives, Dwyer showed up at Wright's house unannounced.

[Detective David Dwyer]

He was totally unprepared. And here comes a guy walking up there with two detectives. And then I'm in a suit, just, boom, I need to speak with you.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Wright invited Dwyer in, and everyone took a seat at the kitchen table. Then Dwyer immediately laid out his issues with Wright's original statement to the police. He even claimed he could prove Wright was in the house when the gun went off. He couldn't. Dwyer was bluffing, but he hoped to shake Wright up enough to get his cooperation. Wright remained silent.

[Detective David Dwyer]

I know what an innocent person should have said. Your investigation is junk. I was outside. But when he says and just stares at me, all right, he was there. This is what I have to work on.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Wright asked the detectives to leave and said he would think about what Dwyer had said and get back to him. Wright called Dwyer the very next morning and asked to meet again. The local police hooked Dwyer up with a recording device that simply looked like a cell phone. He had plans to meet Wright at a local hotel. Dwyer pretended to be Wright's friend as they sat at a picnic table outside the hotel. Dwyer told Wright that it was possible Kimberly shot herself. But it was Wright's insistence that he was outside when the gun went off that was making him look guilty. Here's some audio from the recording device.

[Detective David Dwyer]

When I tell you right off the bat, I believed you when you said that you killed the trigger. But if you tell me that you weren't down there, okay, if you stick with that, the picture that's painted of you is that you did something bad.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

After a few minutes, Doug Wright opened up to Dwyer and shared a different version of events. On the day Kimberly was shot, did.

[Detective David Dwyer]

You hold the gun at all? Did you try grabbing the gun from her as she shot herself? How far away were you when she shot herself? That was a. Top of the steps, top of the steps.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Wright had admitted to being inside when Kimberly was shot. Here's Detective Dwyer again.

[Detective David Dwyer]

He says, I get into the stairwell and I hear a gunshot. Like, were you afraid that she was coming after to Shoot you? No. That thought never entered into my head. I said, what'd you do? Well, I went outside and I played. Played was the exact word he said. I went outside and played.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Dwyer felt like Wright's statement was enough evidence for a jury to convict him.

[Detective David Dwyer]

How does a jury look at that story? I hear a gunshot, and then I go outside, and then I come back and do all this stuff to the scene. A jury can read through that. And I realize that while I'm interviewing him that this is good enough.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Sheriff Packel was thrilled with his young detective's work.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Up until the time Dwyer talked to him, he always had himself outside or away. We had to put right at that crime scene. Once we could put him there, then we could start going after him.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Doug Wright was arrested and brought back to Michigan to stand trial. Nine months after Doug Wright was arrested, and 10 years after Kimberly was murdered, the trial began. It was a strong circumstantial case. Plus, Wright's own inconsistent statements worked against him. Wright decided to testify on his own behalf.

[Detective David Dwyer]

You answered his questions? I gave him a statement going down to the jail. I got down to jail. He read the Miranda warnings. I answered his questions. It's your testimony that Sergeant Dwyer so flummest you so rattled you that you admitted that you were at the top of the steps. Is that your testimony? If I said I was at the top of the steps, I didn't mean that. That's correct.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Wright then told a third story about what happened at the time of his wife's death. He heard a noise, but didn't realize it was a gunshot. It sounded more like something breaking.

[Detective David Dwyer]

Mr. Wright, you've been a police officer for a long time, and you carried that Sig Sauer for a long time? Four or five years. Four or five years. And you were intimately familiar with the sound of that gun, correct? I guess so. And a gunshot doesn't sound like a lamp breaking, does it? Surely not. No. And a gunshot doesn't sound like a TV breaking either, does it? So you'd like to change your answer then? There's several things that happen. For every every question asked, there's several answers. Did you just say. For every question asked in several answers. Did you just say that? I said that.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Doug Wright's testimony was enough to convince the jury that he was guilty. He was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in prison. The hard work of the detectives on the case was appreciated by Kimberly's family. This is her cousin Beth. Again, we are so grateful to them.

[Detective David Dwyer]

And it tickles me to think that.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

David slew Goliath and we were sent.

[Detective David Dwyer]

To David's.

[Detective Ives Petrovka]

Doug wright is now 68 years old and serving his sentence in a Michigan prison. His earliest possible release date is in 2024. Cold case files the podcast is hosted by Brooke giddings, produced by McKamey, Lynn and Steve Delamater. Our Executive producer is Ted Butler. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast one. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me rookginnings on Twitter and Brooke the podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group Podcast for Justice. Check out more Cold case [e-mail] or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the AE realcrime [e-mail] realcrime.

[Brooke Giddings]

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[Detective David Dwyer]

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